A procurement manager somewhere in Ohio or Rotterdam has your website open and about ninety seconds to make a decision.
The decision is not whether you are good. They cannot tell that yet and they know it.
The decision is which pile you go in. The real manufacturer, or the trading outfit that will buy from somebody else and add a margin. Everything that happens after those ninety seconds depends on which pile, and almost nothing on your site is written with that in mind.
So here’s my position, and it argues with the question in the title. Your rankings are probably fine. Overseas buyers can find you when they look. What they cannot do is place you, because your website is built to answer a question nobody overseas is asking, and it accidentally answers the one they are asking in the worst possible way.
The query you optimise for is not the query they type
Most Indian export sites are built around “exporter of X in India” or “X manufacturer India”.
Go and look at who types that. It’s other Indian businesses, lead scrapers, and students. A procurement engineer sourcing a component does not search by country first. They search the spec.
The grade. The IS or ASTM standard number. The certification. The capacity in tonnes or units per month. The HS code, sometimes, if they are experienced. Country gets added as a filter afterwards, if at all, and often by somebody senior who has already decided the shortlist.
Which means the page that wins is the one about the specification, not the one about you. A page titled for a standard you actually hold, with the test certificate shown, will earn traffic from three countries while your homepage ranks beautifully for a phrase typed in Pune.
That is a boring fix and most exporters have never made it.
Directories are a category, not a channel
Now the part people disagree with me about.
IndiaMART is a genuinely large thing. By June 2026 it reported something like 8.8 million supplier storefronts, 132 million products and 234 million registered buyers. Only about 218,000 of those suppliers pay for anything, and annualised revenue per paying supplier was reported around Rs 69,000 for that quarter.
Those numbers are not a criticism. They describe what the platform is for, which is domestic distribution at enormous scale, and it does that well.
The limits for export work are structural rather than a failing. The buyer base is overwhelmingly Indian, and European procurement teams are not searching Indian directories to build a vendor list. Because an enquiry costs the buyer nothing, enquiry quality drifts down as volume climbs, and sellers commonly report that only a third to a half of paid leads become a real conversation.
But the real cost isn’t lead quality. It’s that a listing is a commodity position by construction.
You arrive next to forty suppliers with near-identical copy, in a layout where the only visible difference is price. You did not choose to compete on price. The format chose for you, and then you spent two years learning that your market is price sensitive.
Keep the listing. Stop treating it as your export channel.
The four things the buyer is actually checking
Sourcing advisers who do this work describe the same four friction points over and over. Whether the supplier is authentic or a non-value-add intermediary. Price against spec. Quality drift once production starts. And export documentation and shipping coordination.
Read that list again. Every item is a risk question.
Not one is a marketing question, and not one is answered anywhere on a typical Indian export website. That gap is the whole thing. You are producing content for a buying process that is actually a risk assessment.
What “price on request” tells them
Here is where I’d be blunt with a client, because the defaults on these websites all point the same direction.
Price on request. A catalogue of forty products spanning unrelated categories. Stock photography of a factory that isn’t yours. “Best quality at lowest price” in the hero. A Gmail address. A contact form with no human name attached to it.
Each of those is a signal, and every one of them reads as intermediary.
The catalogue is the loudest. A real factory makes a narrow range of things, because machines are expensive and specialised. When your site lists forty unrelated products, you have told an experienced buyer that you are sourcing them, whether or not that is true.
The highest-return change on most Indian export websites is deleting products.
Nobody wants to hear it. Every product page feels like a chance at an order. In practice the forty-product catalogue costs you the serious buyers and keeps the price shoppers, which is the opposite of the trade you want.
Proof that travels eight thousand kilometres
Trust at that distance is not built by saying you are trustworthy. It is built by making verification cheap.
Print your GSTIN and your IEC on the site. A buyer can check a GSTIN free on the GST portal and an IEC on the DGFT portal in about two minutes, and putting both in the footer means you have done that step for them rather than leaving them to wonder. Add the MCA registration details. None of this is confidential and all of it is checkable.
Then photographs of your own shop floor with a visible date, named people with real titles and real faces, certification numbers rather than certification logos, and one named reference in the buyer’s own region who has agreed to take a call.
Large buyers in the EU and North America are also pushing labour and environmental compliance evidence down the chain, because their own reporting obligations require it. If you have that documentation, it belongs on the website. If you don’t, that is becoming a commercial problem rather than a paperwork one.
Where I’d refine the usual timezone advice
The standard advice, including the argument I made about plugging the timezone leak with AI agents, is to cover the buyer’s hours so nothing sits overnight.
I still think that’s right about acknowledgement and routing. I’d push back on it as an answering strategy.
A named human replying nine hours later, having actually read the spec and answered the technical question, beats an instant reply that answers nothing. Speed wins when the buyer is comparing availability. Competence wins when they’re assessing risk, and export procurement is the second one. Automate the receipt, not the reply.
What I’d do first
Pick your single best-selling product, the one you genuinely manufacture, and build one page about its specification rather than about your company. Put the certificate on it. Put the monthly capacity on it. Put a named engineer’s email on it.
Then count the products on your website and ask honestly how many you actually make.
If you’d like to think through which of these applies to your own setup, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on lead generation cover the demand side. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.